It is three days since Professor Alexis Jay published her report into child abuse in Rotherham, and still the sickening implications are sinking in at Westminster. David Cameron had no inkling that it was coming, which is why he has said so little about it. The report, commissioned by the borough council, was expected to mop up any points left over from a notorious paedophile case four years ago. Instead, Prof Jay discovered a far greater, longer-running scandal with more than 1,400 victims. Suddenly, ministers have been presented with one of the most horrific catalogues of abuse in recent British history.

That the Rotherham victims were mainly white, and the perpetrators of mainly Pakistani origin, is a large part of the scandal: fear of being seen as racist had stopped the abuse from being investigated. The absence of resignations from the council (other than that of its 71-year-old leader) is also appalling. If you organise a bureaucracy so no one takes responsibility, then you create the conditions for abuse of this scale.

But perhaps the most potent part of Prof Jay’s report is what it says about life at the very bottom in Britain; the failures it exposes cannot be written off as a problem peculiar to Yorkshire. It shines a light on what can go on in communities left in no doubt that they are regarded as being beneath the law – communities that feel they exist in a parallel world where the authorities to which you and I turn in times of trouble do not function. The people in such communities, this report makes clear, are like ghostly figures. Bureaucracies, from the police to the social services, simply look straight through them. They are residents in Britain’s shadowlands.

Seldom has anyone produced such a tally of victims as that uncovered by Prof Jay in Rotherham. Her estimate of 1,400 victims is cautious, and implies the collapse of the systems intended to protect the vulnerable. It raises questions about the kind of society where abused girls could be trafficked around England on a scale so big that teachers, taxi drivers, parents and publicans knew what was going on.

Why, you might wonder, did no one raise the alarm? The answer, which comes through in page after devastating page of the Jay report, is that all of these people did – but the authorities were not interested. On the face of it, this makes no sense: we’re talking about the South Yorkshire Police, apparently so keen to investigate sexual abuse that they let a BBC helicopter film them arrive to search Sir Cliff Richard’s house. But Sir Cliff is famous, so he is treated in a certain way. The 1,400 victims, by contrast, were invisible.

But they were not invisible to the great many people involved in abuse on this scale. Taxi drivers, for example, played a prominent role in the abuse. “Time and again,” the report says, there are instances “of children being violently raped, beaten, forced to perform sex acts in taxis and cars when they were being trafficked between towns”. Teachers were reporting how pupils were being picked up by taxis at the school gate and driven to abusers during their lunch breaks.

Other drivers tried to raise the alarm and held one taxi firm, in particular, in suspicion. But Prof Jay records the “sense of exasperation, even hopelessness” among these drivers as they got nowhere with the police. The minutes of one meeting record a case of seven girls who said they had been abused, in return for free taxi journeys. When one 13-year-old told her parents about being accosted by a driver, they followed him through town and called the police – who turned up late, then took no action. As the council’s taxi licensing enforcement officer later put it, “a simple check would have revealed that the driver had been arrested a week previously in Bradford for a successful kidnapping”.

You might also ask where the girls’ fathers were. And while it’s true that family breakdown is certainly a problem, the family was no protection. Two fathers in Rotherham did manage to track their daughters down to the houses where they were being abused – but when the police eventually turned up, the fathers were arrested and the abusers walked free. Even victims would be arrested; for being drunk and disorderly, or for breach of the peace. Others were threatened with being arrested for wasting police time.

Word soon gets out: there is no point calling the police – they don’t care and will probably come after you for reporting the crime in the first place. No one can claim this is peculiar to Yorkshire. It fits a wider trend, about parts of the cities police avoid because the people in them are considered problems. The police are recorded in the Jay report as “regarding many child victims with contempt and failing to act upon their abuse as a crime” and “parents were often not reporting a missing child as they saw it as a waste of time”.

It wasn’t just parents who gave up on the system. As far back as 2001, the Jay report reveals that a Home Office researcher was in Rotherham looking into prostitution. She befriended a girl who said she was being repeatedly raped by abusers who had broken both of her brother’s legs when she tried to escape. She did, eventually, summon the courage to go to the police, but on arrival received a text message from the main perpetrator saying he had her 11-year-old sister. “Your choice,” said the text message. The girl walked away, telling the researcher: “You can’t protect me.”

She was right. When the researcher took this up with the police, in a hand-delivered note, she was granted a meeting. “She was instructed never to do such a thing again,” says the Jay report. “The content of her letter was not discussed.” So again, is it any surprise that the girls and their parents had no hope in the system? If a Home Office research officer could not raise the interest of the police, what hope for girls with chequered records in the council estates of Rotherham?

The past few months have shown British police being energetic in pursuit of certain sex offenders, not ignoring crimes committed decades ago. Yet the Jay report shows them uninterested after being repeatedly told of the most heinous crimes imaginable. Part of it would have been a feeling among the police that the problem was one of child prostitutes, rather than predatory adults. Prof Jay was shocked to find analogies to prostitution were being used at council meetings as late as 2005.

The idea that “consent” – or a simulacrum of it – somehow obviated the crime seems to have been deep-rooted. When a 12-year-old girl was found to have had sex with five adults, two of them were let off with a caution. One CID officer later said it should not be categorised as sexual abuse because the 12-year-old had been “100 per cent consensual in every incident”. He was overruled, but the fact that such a point could be made (and minuted) speaks volumes about the mindset. A deplorably high number of meetings had no minutes kept at all.

Part of South Yorkshire Police’s reluctance may be linked to their dismal record in clearing up this crime. They launched Operation Central in 2008, which resulted in the five well-publicised convictions. But none of the subsequent operations – Czar, K-Alphabet, Chard, Kappa and Carrington – have resulted in any prosecutions.

Perhaps new laws are needed now, to stop the trafficking of English girls in taxis from the school gate to the bedrooms of abusers. The same lesson can be drawn: when police can’t (or won’t) act, then evil flourishes. And unlike many of the sexual abuse cases that have been publicised recently, there is nothing historic about these failures. The system is broken now, and many of those who presided over it are still in place.

Prof Jay has lifted up a stone that is usually left undisturbed in Britain – and given a devastating example of the problems that the Prime Minister alluded to when he spoke about our “broken society” nine years ago. Her report makes it clear that many of the safeguards there for those at the bottom are broken too. Mr Cameron would be wise to give himself some time before responding properly to this: the odds are that he, too, has been astonished by the scale of the problem. It falls to him to provide the solution.